Sunday, October 5, 2014

Margaret Wente, bullying and irony

Recently
Margaret Wente went
afterNaomi Klein – first for her looks, and then – having not bothered
to read Klein’s new book – for what she (falsely)
claimed was not included in it.It’s one
thing to launch contrarian volleys at attractive young female
authors who are getting loads of press; someone of Klein’s stature expects
legitimate blowback, and has a platform from which to respond.But this week’s rant
contains a bizarre, unsubstantiated and unnecessary attack on two obscure women
– something I find problematical.

How a school
project by a Vancouver design student came to be dragged into Wente’s column as
the face of state tyranny is puzzling. Here’s the relevant bit:

“soft paternalism” can morph pretty quickly into “soft authoritarianism,”
exemplified by people who are dogmatic, self-righteous and wrong. I ran across
a prime example in an e-book by Vancouver’s Bree Galbraith called The Designer Nudge. In it is an
interview with Dr. Verity Livingstone, a breastfeeding specialist at the
University of British Columbia. The issue is how to nudge new mothers into
breastfeeding. Dr. Livingstone is firmly in the camp that believes
bottle-feeding borders on child abuse and should be discouraged by any means
available, even duplicitous ones.

“If you are trying to move them along, to nudge them, you have to decide if
the information has to be ‘scary’ to possibly shift them sooner than the
positive bit would,” she said.That’s
the problem in a nutshell. It’s a short step from nudging people to terrorizing
them and pushing them around.

“They are simply imposing their own preferences on the rest of us”,Wente concludes, “And
I don’t like bullies”.

Cass
Sunstein, originator of “nudge theory”, advisor to Presidents, well known public figure, gets a mention at the beginning of the
article, but escapes Wente’s wrath.Nor
are powerful figures like Mayor Bloomberg - whose soda ban initiatives would
make a more suitable target - positioned as examples of nudge theory nudging
into tyranny.Instead of advertisers, leading
opinion makers or legislators, Wente zeroes in on a strange target - an Emily
Carr student who published a set of interviews on the interface of nudge theory
and design with a few educators and experts. Among these, Wente singles out Dr. Livingstone
as a “duplicitous” terrorizer.

Unlike
Sunstein, or Klein, Ms. Galbraith’s academic writing has very limited
readership.She’s apparently a good student, and the
small publication Wente has somehow (and this remains a mystery) unearthed as
an example of tyranny is apparently work for her Master’s degree.

In it, Galbraith
makes no authoritarian pronouncements.She poses mostly intelligent questions. It's hard to see how the questions, or Dr. Livingstone's answers would seem to any normal person to be particularly “terrorizing”, “dogmatic”, “self-righteous”, or
“wrong”.Even were this so, Wente
doesn’t make a case for it; unlike the student, she simply states
these things as fact.The only ‘evidence’ appears
to reside in one word (“scary”) pulled from a lengthy and otherwise benign interview
with Dr. Verity Livingstone.

You can
read it here.It contains standard language and policy on
breastfeeding from Health Canada, the Canadian Pediatric Association, the WHO,
or similar bodies. Health Canada is
unequivocal: “Breastfeeding is the normal and unequalled method of feeding infants.
Health Canada promotes breastfeeding - exclusively for the first
six months, and sustained for up to two years or longer”.The American Academy of Pediatrics
goes further: “Given the documented short- and long-term
medical and neurodevelopmental advantages of breastfeeding, infant nutrition
should be considered a public health issue and not only a lifestyle choice”.But Ms. Wente takes no issue with the big
science bodies, focusing on Dr. Livingstone - who nowhere in her interview
suggests, as Wente claims, that bottle feeding “borders on child abuse”.

On the
contrary, she acknowledges that some women can’t breastfeed “for
legitimate reasons”, and as a result “are feeling a guilt trip put
upon them.We have to be aware that we
can’t be so fanatical that there is only one way of doing it, accept that there
are times when people’s behaviours can’t be changed – we have to support
everyone”.

So why select
Livingstone and misrepresent her in the pages of The Globe and Mail?Did Wente contact the women first? If not, why
ambush individuals who are in no position to respond or command the kind of
readership of Wente herself, or Sunstein, or Klein? Aren’t there many more
obvious examples of “scaring” people into particular behaviours? And why not link to the student’s publication
so readers could judge for themselves?

Ms.
Wente seems to have a thing about the “tyranny” of breast-feeding.In a column a few years ago, she used some of
the same language about “child abuse”, along with material that demonstrated attribution
problems related to an earlier article by Helen
Rumbelowand a blogger named
Susan Barston.

Wente:
One of the world’s most authoritative sources of breastfeeding research
is Michael Kramer, professor of pediatrics at McGill University. “The public
health breastfeeding promotion information is way out of date,” he says. The
trouble is that the breastfeeding lobby is at war with the formula milk industry,
and neither side is being very scientific. “When it becomes a crusade, people
are not very rational.”

Rumbelow:
…one of the world’s most authoritative sources of breastfeeding research…
Michael Kramer, professor of paediatrics at McGill University, Montreal.…“The
public health breastfeeding promotion information is way out of date,” Kramer
says. The trouble is, he said, that the breastfeeding lobby is at war with the
formula milk industry, and “neither side is being very scientific ... when it
becomes a crusade, people are not very rational.”

In Wente’s version the quotation marks slide, shortening one quote and presentingas her own prose some of what in Rumbelow’s article appeared as Kramer's words. In addition she seems to take some of
Rumbelow’s summary of Kramer as her own prose.In the same piece, she appeared to borrow from writer Suzanne Barston,
who published an interview with Joan Wolf on her website.

…breastfeeding is part of what I call total
motherhood, the belief that mothers are both capable of and responsible for
preventing any imaginable risk to their babies and children… we are making
mothers crazy today by telling them that they have the power, if they are
willing to put forth the effort and make sacrifices, to prevent all sorts of
bad things from happening to their kids.

Wente reproduces this,
casting the same words published in the interview as something Wolf “told one group of moms”:

"Breastfeeding is part of what I call total motherhood, the belief
that mothers are both capable of and responsible for preventing any imaginable
risk to their babies and children," she told one group of moms. "We
are making mothers crazy by telling them that they have the power, if they are
willing to put forth the effort and make sacrifices, to prevent all sorts of
bad things from happening to their kids."

In
addition to intellectual and journalistic sloppiness, it’s the unnecessary mean
spiritedness in Wente’s writing which continues to astonish – the seemingly
arbitrary selection of sacrificial victims who can’t fight back.Like the zero tolerance she claims we should
reserve only for studentplagiarists,
when it comes to ‘bullying’, Ms. Wente seems remarkably lacking in self
awareness.